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Comment by yaddayadda | Hacker News Reader

McDonald's expects their full-time, minimum-wage employees to work a second job just to survive!

Their minimum-wage employees are expected to do physical and mental labor for 302 hours a month (75.5 hrs/wk) to earn a grand total of $2,060, while people such as Mitt Romney literally don't have to do any labor to earn $1,075,000 in carried interest (and only carried interest, that doesn't include capital gains or anything else) during the same month [1].

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/24/news/economy/Romney_tax_retu...

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Huge assets are at stake in large organizations, and experienced leaders are crucial for their continued success. If I had a lot of money at stake in a company, I would divest as fast as I could if someone were to suddenly replace its CEO with a 20-year-old McDonald's cashier.

I also don't think that the outcome would necessarily be the same if the 20-year-old cashier and a 20-year-old Romney were to somehow change places. In life, we constantly face choices, and while unchosen circumstances play some role in who we are (I will never be a professional basketball player or a ballerina), we are not predetermined. Ahead of each of us, at every moment, is a forking path. The future does not exist yet.

I fail to see what Mitt Romney has to do with this. Care to explain what exactly you're proposing?

That free-market capitalism sometimes produces unjust results, I assume?

Looks like someone that is jealous of a rich person.

Seriously, what is this world coming to... When did people stop working so hard, but rather coveting their neighbors house?

The point is presumably that it's rather unfair. That MR isn't really that many times more worthwhile than a McDonalds employee but that there are perverse incentives or a bad opportunities structure or something that, so to speak, is there to keep people down.

Brainwashed by the American Dream. You too can have all this one day! Just work hard and keep your nose to the grindstone!

Unfortunately that's increasingly no longer the case.

How does earning interest qualify as "work"?

75 hours a week isn't hard work ?

> When did people stop working so hard, but rather coveting their neighbors house?

When did people not covet their neighbors house? This sounds like canned tea party rhetoric.

The facts will certainly support a widening gap between the wealthy and poor in our (US) society. Will they also support this alleged paradigm shift in working class mentality?

Oh ya, Mitt, the epitome of a hard worker.

Do you say this for any reason outside of not agreeing with him politically?

Looking at the man's resume, combined with the fact that he has run multiple political campaigns - including one for POTUS, which is no cake-walk - tells me the guy is a pretty hard worker.

I'm not going to comment on the "fairness" of the relative wages, but implying that a McDonald's employee and Mitt Romney are equally productive, or work equally hard, is nonsense regardless of your political stance.

Some people have the power to tilt the system in their favor, some do not.

Now imagine if we tried to solve the problem of unemployment the way libertarians want: by abolishing minimum wage restrictions altogether. If minimum-wage jobs dropped in wages by as little as 25%, their employees would have to work for 100 hours a week in order to survive - as the price of labour at the bottom of the market goes down, the demand has to go up as people are forced to work longer. The libertarian proposal makes no sense and yet they carry on making it.

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